Saint Exupéry writes one of the three or four greatest flying books. He became a mails pilot in 1926, flying mail and passengers for Latécoère, which became Aéropostale, flying from Toulouse into Spain and across to French West Africa and later flying in South America. He writes about the feeling of being detached from the earth and in another realm when flying. He writes about the heroic exploits of his friends Mermoz and Guillaumet, and it is the existential hero he describes: “He knew that he was responsible for himself, for the mails, for the fulfillment of the hopes of his comrades. He was holding in his hands their sorrow and their joy. He was responsible for that new element which the living were constructing and in which he was a participant. Responsible, in as much as his work contributed to it, for the fate of those men.”
In “The Tool” S-E makes a couple of points about airplanes: 1) their evolving design is a matter of carving away complications to reach simplicity, and 2) they are tools to help reduce the distance between people.
“The Elements” describes his flight through a “cyclone” on the slopes of the Andes. The point of “The Plane and the Planet” is that when we get up in the air, we see a far more desolate and barren landscape than we see from roads.
In “The Oasis” S-E describes being taken in by a charming family when he was forced down near Concordia in the Argentine. The daughters practice on him a variant of the game he remembers his sisters playing, assessing guests and giving them a rating while they sit at table. Here the test is how he reacts to the snakes he hears hissing and slithering under the table in the dilapidated but genteel house. He does not try to show off being a pilot, “for it is extremely dangerous to clamber up to the topmost branches of a plane-tree simply to see if the nestlings are doing well or to say good morning to one’s friends.”
In “Men of the Desert” he notes “I shall never be able to express clearly whence comes this pleasure men take from aridity, but always and everywhere I have seen men attach themselves more stubbornly to barren lands than to any other. Men will die for a calcined, leafless, stony mountain. The nomads will defend to the death their great store of sand as if it were a treasure of gold dust.”
S-E says he “succumbed to the desert as soon as I saw it” in 1926, when he first began flying. A passage that must have rung true with Langewiesche when he read it:
When the night is very fine and you are at the stick of your ship, you half forget yourself and bit by bit the plane begins to tilt on the left. Pretty soon, while you still imagine yourself in plumb, you see the lights of a village under your right wing. There are no villages in the desert. A fishing-fleet in mid-ocean, then? There are no fishing-fleets in mid-Sahara. What¬¬¬¬----? Of course! You smile at the way your mind has wandered and you bring the ship back to plumb again. The village slips into place. You have hooked that particular constellation back in the panoply out of which it had fallen. Village? Yes, village of stars.
S-E describes the Moors who are unable to conceive of things they have not seen: waterfalls, the size of Paris, trees. He tells about Mohammed from Marrakech, a slave of the Arabs and like all slaves called Bark, whose freedom the airmen eventually buy.
The penultimate section is a long self-contained narrative, “Prisoner of the Sand,” about an end-of-December 1935 Paris-Saigon flight S-E attempts with his mechanic, Prévot, in a Caudron Simoun, one of the fastest planes of the time. They lost landmarks in cumulus and adverse winds in Libya. They crash at full speed onto a gentle slope covered with “round black pebbles which had rolled over and over like ball-bearings beneath us.” Their water tank is pierced and they survive for days on a couple of oranges and a tiny amount of water, hiking away from the plane by day and building signal fires near it by night. Eventually they are rescued by a Bedouin caravan, and next day they are in Cairo.
The last section, “Barcelona and Madrid (1936), concerns S-E’s experiences in those towns during the Spanish Civil War. He ponders the question why these people kill each other over political differences that hardly seem deadly. Some of the descriptions remind me of Goya etchings and Black paintings.
S-E compares his own calling to those fighting for various causes, and concludes that “What all of us want is to be set free.” He ends by asking his “comrades of the air,” “When have we felt ourselves happy men?” There is a nice section about making common cause with other men: “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.” ( )

This book is all about war-time flying, but it also is shrouded in mystery. Five years after writing Wind, Sand and Stars (originally published in French as Terre de Hommes) Saint-Exupery went missing after a mission over southern France. He was never heard from again. Where did he go? Another tantilizing mystery is whether Wind, Sand and Stars is fiction or nonfiction. Part philosophy, part action adventure, all in the first person it is impossible to tell. Could it be semi-biographical in the sense that some of the events are real but names and places have been changed to protect the innocent? I wasn't able to extract fact from fiction.
Another interesting fact about Wind, Sand and Stars was the fact that once the book was published in France in 1939 Saint-Exupery rushed off to the United States to write two extra chapters. It was if he could never be satisfied with the finished product and wanted to keep writing and writing. ( )

I loved this book, its cover design, its typeface, its philosophy which flew over my head as a teenager. It is full of my pencil annotations. ( )

I liked this book because I have a feeling, if I'd ever met the author, I would've gotten along well with him. His philosophy of life is right on par with mine--that truth is relative ("if an orange-tree grows well in THIS soil, THIS soil is Truth for that orange-tree"); war is heinous, ugly and incomprehensible ("as for me, I only wish I understood mankind"); and the spiritual stuff in human nature must be nurtured ("but there is no gardener for men"). I also enjoyed his unique perspective on death ("death in its own time is sweet") and technology (new technology may feel unnatural to us, but it's only because our culture hasn't caught up with it yet, i.e. the locomotive).

His prose also reads like poetry--beautiful writing that makes him quite the absorbing story-teller. Definitely recommend. ( )

Great book. Great descriptions of flying and thoughts about it ( )